We are good at reading. We may have forgotten but it took us years to learn, initially not even marrying the meaning to the words, eventually delighting in the richness of content.
When it comes to the descriptions of spiritual states, language is an interesting thing. It is both a gateway and an obstacle. We all know that reading about the experience of meditation, for example, is not the same as experiencing it. The instance where this is most heightened is when it comes to the experience of bliss.
Bliss, sat-chit-ananda, is a concatenation of so much more than intellect and physicality. We may read of it but there is very little we can do from that point.
Another of our tendencies, you see, is to categorize things as good or bad. This sets in at a very early stage, and though it is a graduated evaluation we can pretty much always determine which side of the spectrum an experience is on: the good or the bad. The pleasant, the slightly pleasant, the unpleasant, or the not-so-pleasant.
What we are not so good at, or at least, not when we are on the level of deciphering language, is accepting that an experience can be both good and bad. It doesn’t fit with our brains’ neat way of categorizing. The thing about sat-chit-ananda is that it encompasses all everything. It is what we have read about and it is what we have not read about, it is the argument and the counterargument. It holds in the same space: the understanding, the not quite understanding and the not understanding at all. That is the point. This is it.
This moment is translucent, uncoloured. The colours we choose to paint it will necessarily be limited by our choice. The spiritual path is one of simultaneously emptying while realizing that true fullness can be emptied indefinitely.
There is no place to go to find this, wherever you are, there you are. There is no moment more precious than this one, that much we know. But can we know this and hold the possibility of there being no moment at all?
Greater minds have puzzled these questions and more elaborate explanations have been presented. The restless mind demands these things but really, actually, there could be nothing more beautifully complex than the pure simplicity of it all.